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Untitled Article
mer was prompted solely by ambition and the lust of conquest and domination . The latter acted
as the " Captain of the Lord ' s host , " without any motive of avarice or ambition , under an immediate commission from God himself . It may not perhaps be
easy to explain why war should be admitted under the divine government . This is a particular case under the general question of the introduction of evil . But
as it cannot be denied that the existence of this evil is consistent with the justice and benevolence of the divine character , it is most evident that of all wars recorded
in history , the extermination of the Canaanites by the Israelites is the most justifiable . It was not founded in ambition or injustice . It was the execution of a just sentence by those who exhibited a clear indisputable warrant for that purpose .
These considerations completely satisfy rne that there is nothing in the history of the extermination of the Canaanites supposing it to be literally true , if taken in its whole connexion , which militates against the character of the
supreme Bi ing , or which can form any just objection against the divine authority of the Jewish lawgiver . If however a contrary hypothesis be assumed , whether the narrative is to be considered as a
dramatic representation of a common event , as Nebuchadnezzar is said to have been commissioned fey God to subdue Tyre and Egypt , or whether the Israelites invatied
the country , either with or without a fanatical impression that they were instigated to it by a divine impulse , the conquest of Can ' dfin in ^ hose circumstances ,
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however unjust , would no more affect my faith in the divine lega ^ tion of Moses , than the invasion
of the same country , almost thirty centuries afterwards , by a horde of Christian enthusiasts and fana . tics , staggers my confidence in the mission of Jesus Christ . For as f
do not hold it essential to the faith
of a Christian , to receive every fact contained in the New Testament , so neither is it essential to a firm belief in the Jewish dispensation , to assent to every fact contained in the pentateuch : though I feel no difficulty to
acknowledge , that in the present instance the balance of
probability is in my estimation m favour of the history . The second question is , " Why under the Old Testament the rewards and punishments were of a temporal nature , whilst under the New they are asserted to be future and eternal ?"
The direct answer to this question is , that such was the appointment of divine wisdom , for reasons no doubt in themselves perfectly just and good , though the limited intellect of man may not be able to comprehend or to dis * cover theniir Though your
correspondent has not stated where his difficulty lies , I presume that he means to ask how it can be reconciled to divine wisdom , that the Mosaic dispensation should be enforced by temporal sanctions only , to the almost entire exclusion of those of a future life .
The principal reason for the introduction of temporal sanctions seems to have been that as the Jewish nation was selected by God to bear testimony to the important doctritie of the divine . Unity , this testimony would be more marked ,
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58 % Mr . B ( tshim on the Consistency and Truth of Divine Revelation ,
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Nov. 2, 1808, page 582, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2398/page/6/
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